Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin- How to use, benefits & review

Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin which provides all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog. Read the following article to know why it is used by experts worldwide.

I know how much difficult and time consuming it is to rank a blog high in the search engines. With a million of blogs created every day, online business continues to face a high competition. Moreover, Google's regulatory updates create even more havoc to the websites and it has even made several webmasters to quit this competition. So, while writing an article online, it is very crucial to take every precaution and make it sure that nothing is copyrighted, not even the images. But writing good quality articles and then focusing on search engine optimization will consume a lot of time. So what should we do in this situation? Should we pay some SEO experts to review and optimize our site? I know you have such questions in your mind and want to know some solution to these problems. Don't worry! There are several SEO plugins which will help you to optimize your site quickly and effectively. After trying a huge pile of SEO plugins in my WordPress blog, I have figured out the best SEO plugin for a WordPress blog. And Yoast SEO plugin is the complete solution to all your website's SEO problems. For the complete knowledge about this plugin so as to better optimize your website's content, have a look at its features which have been provided below with full details.

Optimize titles & Meta descriptions

Whenever you write a post in your WordPress blog, just go to the end of that page and you will notice a section "WordPress SEO by Yoast". Here you can optimize your article by providing it a SEO title with its meta description. But before doing this, I recommend you to choose a keyword with which you want to optimize your post. After selecting an appropriate keyword, just fill it in Focus Keyword section shown by Yoast SEO. After completely writing your content, have a look at the Snippet Preview which will give you a preview of your content in the same way as it will be displayed in the Google search. So, with this plugin, you can analyze how your page appears to Google and can truly optimize it with the necessary steps.

Canonical link, Robots Meta configuration & Breadcrumbs

Canonical link is an element introduced by Google to distinguish the original page of a website from its derivative pages which carry the same content. So, this plugin automatically works on this and it also fixes some related issues without giving you any headache. Moreover, if you want to hide a particular post or a section of your site from being indexed by the Google bot then you can easily do it with the help of this plugin. Just open the "Yoast SEO settings" and click on the advanced settings tab. Here you can choose your desired settings from the meta robots settings block and apply them on your pages. And you can also choose to noindex a certain category, tag or custom taxonomy or give a certain category a unique title with its meta description. With the help of Yoast's Breadcrumbs code, you can determine a certain title to be used for a post type. And with this feature, you can also set a specific title and taxonomy to a given page.

Permalink clean up

You would have encountered some weird variables being introduced at the end of your post's URL when you publish an article in your Wordpress blog. I know how much pain it gives a writer who has to again and again post his article in order to get the correct URL. But now it is very easy to handle this problem. With Yoast's SEO plugin, you can just check the desired box in the permalink settings which best suit your content. If you have already posted a couple of articles and have faced the same problem then don't panic. All you have to do is just go to each of your post one by one and there you will see something like this - Edit Permalink address and simply edit the URL with your own keywords that best suit your content. Remember to separate each word with "-" sign.

Extra features

XML sitemaps: I am sure you are well aware of this important factor of a website. XML sitemaps are very crucial for SEO and really help in ranking a website better. Yoast's SEO plugin considers this factor and it automatically generates a good looking XML sitemap by using an XSLT stylesheet on them. This makes your sitemap readable to both the search engines and humans.

Robots.txt and .htaccess: With this superb SEO plugin, you can easily edit your website's robots.txt and .htaccess files. You can easily edit them from the "Files menu" of the WordPress SEO plugin. Moreover, you can easily check and update these files while keeping it all nice and clean.

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